IT on a Shoestring: Stop Paying for Commoditized Technology

TOUGH TIMES MAKE YOU THINK HARD ABOUT WHAT YOU STILL CAN ACCOMPLISH WITH FEWER RESOURCES. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE RESOURCES YOU HAVE YET TO TAP INTO?

When it comes to IT, there are a multitude of low-cost and free resources available. The question is, which ones are worth considering? What low-cost resources will not only save you money in the short-term, but also are reliable, proven and secure enough to not introduce long-term pain in the process? This article dives into practical examples that you can start using today, to save dollars and look like a hero in the process.
For the past 10 years, many technologies that we have been using reached wide scale adoption and thus essentially have become commoditized. It’s baffling how many companies continue to invest large amounts of dollars to pay for technologies that have reached mainstream status. These technologies aren’t necessarily giving companies a competitive advantage anymore. They are simply there to help run the business. In these cases, consider a few options to cut costs by using proven low-cost or free solutions.

Open Source Software – Community Driven Solutions

Commoditized software often comes in the form of open source technology projects. Now, I’m not saying all open source projects are commoditized technologies, but many OSS projects spring up because a group of talented developers are tired of paying for a set of services that would be relatively easy to recreate.
Good open source projects have strong communities behind them, and in some cases, build better features and offer better support than the commoditized technologies they originally set out to reproduce. The key to picking an open source project, is not by the product’s current features, but by the strength and viability of the community behind it. The community can be measured by the speed of innovation (i.e. how quickly product releases reach shippable status), the support forums (i.e. how mature and active the discussion forums are) and the number of active installations currently in production environments. If support, service and commercial product businesses have been built around open source solutions, you can feel that much more comfortable that the project’s got some legs and is going to be around for the foreseeable future.

Software as a Service Gaining Momentum

Other commoditized software has morphed into a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. New and existing vendors are packaging solutions that don’t come with a sticker-price, but instead, a subscription fee reserved for the individuals that need to use them. Many of these solutions have free programs available for a limited number of users (great for SMBs) or with limited feature-sets, which in some cases, are all that a company needs.

It’s even more important to analyze the viability of SaaS vendors, since the technologies are relatively closed in comparison to open source solutions. While evaluating SaaS solutions, it’s important to understand a vendor’s funding/cash position, subscription base and the openness of their platform, in case you want to migrate to a different solution at a later date.

The table below compares and ranks some attributes of the three different models:


In today’s market, where the cost and time to build software has been greatly reduced, almost every common aspect of a business has an open source or SaaS option to support it; from office productivity, to collaboration platforms to customer relationship management. To illustrate some examples, the table below outlines some very viable open source and SaaS products (and their proprietary product equivalents). All of these solutions fit the litmus test outlined above for both OSS and SaaS platforms.


These are by no means the only options, but they are all definitely worth considering as low cost alternatives, often providing 80% (or more) of the proprietary solution’s functionality, that you use 99% of the time.

Cloud Computing - Pay as You Go

Commoditized hardware solutions now are offered in the form of Cloud Computing Infrastructure Services. Many vendors like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM are starting to build massively scalable data centers (think power plants), and are offering up their computing resources in a “pay by the drink” model. This means that instead of companies having to pay for an entire server and all of the business continuity, disaster recovery and administration fees that come with it, they can choose to pay by the GB of storage used per month or pay by the CPU power they consume. In other words, you can pay for infrastructure services the same way you pay for water or electricity, with all of the BC, DR and support costs baked in.

The birth of these services is relatively recent, and there still are a lot of questions around security, SLAs and privacy, all of which are being handled in slightly different ways by the different vendors. There’s bound to be some standardization in these areas as the technologies mature, but there are ways to take advantage of these services in the short term -- if not as alternative production environments for non-mission critical apps, then certainly as test environments for new and existing applications. The associated hardware and networking costs for test environments often mirror the cost of production environments. Cloud computing is a great way to mitigate those costs.

The table below outlines some of the major players in this space and their relative service offerings. Amazon is definitely the most mature, but IBM, Google and Microsoft are hot on its heels with more advanced solutions coming available.


Your Competitive Advantage

There is a time and a place to build and host technologies that will position your company for competitive advantage. But now is a time when we’re being asked to tighten our belts. To be successful in this economic environment, we should find creative ways to stop paying license and support fees for commoditized services and save those dollars for what really is going to give us an edge -- our people.